Hurray for Mayor Pothole

EXAMINER EDITORIAL WRITER

Published 4:00 am, Friday, April 30, 1999

1999-04-30 04:00:00 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- SUDDENLY Willie Brown is being pegged as the West Coast version of Rudy Giuliani, the hard-nosed Republican who as mayor of New York has cleaned up the Big Apple.

Move over, Rudy baby.

Out here in Baghdad by the Bay, that former party animal, Mayor Brown, has rediscovered such nitty-gritty quality-of-life issues as parks, dealing with homelessness and making the streets safe for pedestrians.

We could be snide and point out that 1999 is a mayoral election year in San Francisco, but that would be mean. We could say, "We told you so." (In fact, if we had a dime for every time we have urged Mayor Brown to attend to "the nuts and bolts of city government," we'd have nearly enough to solve some of the lesser urban problems ourselves.) We could say, "It's about time." But that would be unkind.

Instead, we'll humbly take Mayor Brown at his word that he intends to become "Mayor Pothole" and attack with vigor the most basic, and boring, urban concerns.

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We wish him luck.

Further, we hope he has perseverance - and continues grappling with the nuts and bolts of city government (klunk, another dime) not just during this election year but, should he win re-election, for the next five years. He may need the extended time to solve each and every problem completely.

Many citizens seem to have made improved performance by Muni the litmus test for Brown's success as a hands-on mayor. That's hard to argue with. Even Brown himself has staked his popularity on making the system run better.

Parks are similarly important to nearly every San Franciscan, and these urban oases have suffered for years from lack of care and funding.

Brown isn't the first mayor to "get tough" on homelessness, but he is outdoing his predecessors. Waging "war" on the homeless may be an exaggeration of Brown's effort, but it does make former Mayor Frank Jordan's Matrix program look like a Mother Teresa outreach. We still think The City of St. Francis would do better if it simply guaranteed every homeless person a roof over their heads and a strong cup of coffee in the morning. Isn't that more humane than providing them shopping carts?

Mayoral success in any of these areas is hard to judge, especially in the few short months remaining until the election. Instead, we'd like to propose this test for Mayor Brown as an excellent way to decide whether or not he deserves re-election: Can he clean the streets and keep them spotless until November?

The streets of San Francisco are a foul mess of litter and waste. They are an embarrassment to residents and an annoyance to visitors. It's not the fog that slips in on little cat's feet, it's McDonald's wrappers, broken bottles and effluvia of a thousand different sorts.

Our filthy streets signal that this supposed

"world-class city" is instead no-class, that it can't clean up its own act.

The importance of clean streets isn't lost on the mayor. He has sponsored, and participated in, clean-up days. A couple of years ago, he was furious about the blowing trash on the one-time Path of Gold (Market Street) and ordered it picked up. He put welfare recipients to work sweeping streets. "He has an obsession about tidiness," says his press secretary, Kandace Bender.

The mayor gets it: Clean is good.

So, this is our simple electoral test for the nuts-and-bolts Mayor Brown: Clean streets, you win; dirty streets, you lose.&lt;

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